About “Delicate”

Much like “Gorgeous,” “Delicate” sees Taylor taking a more hesitant approach while pursuing a new man, likely Joe Alwyn, her boyfriend as of the song’s release. Sonically, the record utilizes chilling voice harmonies backed by a simple instrumental.

What have the artists said about the song?

So this is a song called ‘Delicate.’ There is like an effect that you may hear on the vocals throughout the rest of the album that is recurring and it’s a vocoder. And um, what is that you say? It’s a vocal effect where you sing and the vocoder splits your voice into chords and you can play your voice on a keyboard in chords. So basically, if you’re singing the notes of a piano and you could play your own voice. So that’s what you’ll hear in the beginning and throughout this song and then you’ll hear it several times – we tried it in the studio and I thought it sounded really emotional and really vulnerable and really kind of like sad but beautiful. This is a song that like, the idea of your reputation is, um, is definitely something that I play on for the entire album but when the album starts off it’s much more bombastic, it’s more like, ‘Oh, I don’t care about what you say about me, I don’t care what say about my reputation, it doesn’t matter, Blah!’ But, like, then it hits this point on track 5 where it’s like… oh god, what happens when you meet someone who you really want in your life and then you start worrying about what they’ve heard before they met you? You start to wonder like, ‘Could something fake, like your reputation, affect something real, like someone getting to know you?’ And you start to wonder, um, how much does all that matter? And this is the first point of vulnerability in the record where you’re like, ‘Oh, maybe this does actually matter a little bit.’ Um, and how does that factor in? Kind of questioning the reality and the perception of a reputation what that actually… how much weight it actually has. So this is called ‘Delicate.’